During the past months, I held a workshop at the FabLab Torino teaching people how to design their own hardware using KiCAD. (workshop lessons archive)

During the workshop, we designed LibreMote, a simple remote controller programmable just like an Arduino Pro Mini which has an integrated accelerometer and a joystick. This served us as a pretty good example to introducing the design of simple hardware, from the electronics schematics to the PCB routing.

Yesterday, I finally received the LibreMote PCBs from Dorkbot PDX. I'll be assembling them soon and see how (if?) they work!

I've been playing with Sparkfun's 4-Digit 7-Segment Display, of course connected to an Arduino. I recorded this short video to show how it works. I'm using the blue model which is very bright and visible indoor. Unfortunately, under direct sunlight doesn't work well and requires a bit of shadow to be visible.

In the video, I'm using the reference example code created by Sparkfun which is a simple timer.

I'm doing my first steps with Xbee/Zigbee, since I'm using it in a project for the Ph.D... to get started with it I decided to do a little orientation sensing prototype. I used an Arduino FIO as brain, connected to an Xbee and one of my FreeIMU.

Here is a picture of the setup:

Here is a little video demonstrating the setup.. as you can see it's pretty laggy.. I just using 9600 bauds here, so that's why it lags so much. Of course, configuring the modules for faster speeds and optimizing communication more I don't have doubts that I can get almost real-time tracking.

So, what's my reaction to this? Maybe you are thinking that I should be pretty mad about this, that I should report the cloning to ebay, call the police or something like that..

Instead.. I'm very proud of this.

In my opinion, being cloned is something which can occur to anybody on anything nowadays. Chinese are very good at cloning and they are doing that on everything: phones, fashion, art, electronics...

But Chinese they are also very smart. When they decide to clone, they simply go out and clone the best available. So, I consider FreeIMU being copied simply as an undeniable statement of its quality.

Moreover, I released FreeIMU under CC-BY-SA, meaning that selling a copy of FreeIMU or a derivative work from it is perfectly legal. In fact, I always encouraged and supported people in building their own FreeIMU.

Of course, I would have appreciated to be contacted by the Chinese: "Hey, we are going to clone your work and make money out of it, but we'd like to donate a bit to support your work".. but I understand that this isn't a common practice for them.. at least, they decided to keep the original silkscreen with my name and the link to this website.

I just hope that the people manufacturing those board are working safely and without being exploited.. Considering that even Apple can't guarantee on this, I have strong doubts about it.

But, as soon as spring arrived, I had to fly it again. So, I finally been able to spend a couple of nights fixing it and a couple of days ago it airborne again!

Following a small video on one of its flights. I spent a good amount of time on MultiWii PID tuning. To make my life easier I decided to plug on the quad one of my LibreTooth boards so that I could connect it via Bluetooth from my Android phone. There is a wonderful Android app called MultiWii Configurator which allows you to PID tune your MultiWii copter directly from your phone. With this setup, it's very easy to get to very stable settings.

One of the FreeIMU users, who bought one of our production run FreeIMU boards, shipped me his board as a faulty one. We promptly shipped him a replacement board but when I tested his board I found out that it was working perfectly.

This motivated me enough to record this video (actually using exactly his board) showing you how to correctly connect a FreeIMU board and testing it with the FreeIMU library.

In the workshop, I'm teaching how to design our own hardware using a simple Arduino based remote control as example. The project is called LibreMote, an open hardware remote controller containing an accelerometer, 5 input buttons and a battery which communicates wirelessly via Bluetooth.

In lesson 1 we prototyped the device on a breadboard explaining the functioning of its various components and some theory around them.

In this lesson we designed the electronic schematics of LibreMote using KiCAD. In the attachment below you find the project schematics in PDF and the Kicad sources. The KiCAD sources ZIP also contains the various datasheets of some components we used.

A little note: while in the lessons we always talked about using 5 buttons, I decided to follow Franco's advice and using insted a 5 way joystick which will make everything much more cool ;-)

In the next lesson, starting from this schematics will design our LibreMote PCB. Will be fun!